Plant and Process Control Rooms

An operator who is acknowledging alarms is not watching the process.

Alarm lists grow the way firewall rules grow: every incident adds one, nobody removes any, and within a few years the flood is the normal condition. The operator adapts by acknowledging without reading, which is a rational response to the design and a serious one.

Schedule SECCOM to count the real alarm rate per operator per hour across one week of production. Steady state and during a changeover, because they are different plants.

What you get. A measured alarm rate, a rationalised alarm list with priorities agreed with process engineering rather than assigned by the system, and a console layout matched to the seated reach envelope and the sightlines of the position. Every control used during an upset reachable without the operator standing.

Where SECCOM stops. Safety-instrumented systems remain with the process safety authority. SECCOM designs around them and does not place anything in their path.